New Years Eve I will be with my daughters, their husbands and their children who are now old enough to go to the big tent party that is staged every year on New Years Eve in Mustique in the Caribbean. Lots of music, interesting people and interesting talk, enthusiastic dancing, wonderful weather, the wafts of sea frizzing our hair, the sweetness of a community of families that is not a resort. When midnight arrives we will all act as if it is the first New Years Eve ever. We will go crazy and hoot and holler and hug each other in time with the fireworks.

Then I will tip toe away from the family and head for bed. When my husband was alive he used to insist on hearing each member of the family’s resolutions at dinner, not anyone’s favorite moment except mine. I would wait until the end and resolve something shocking or impossible or horrific to get everybody up and laughing and in a different mood and my husband had enough sense of humour to top my resolution with something outrageous of his own.

These years, as I head up the hill under the stars and the last dribbles of the fireworks I try to resolve something to learn or to change or do better. I haven’t been a great success with resolutions in the past. I forget that we all carry our unconscious like backpacks and it isn’t always easy to change or do better. I am more successful with learning. I give WOW credit for presenting so many ideas, so many different opinions, so many experiences that it is impossible not to learn on this site and this year something someone said – maybe you – will be my last thought of 2008 and will give me my resolution for 2009.